Carrier Services

CornerStone Communications is a channel sales agency for the internet service providers you already know and work with. Functionally, the ISPs compensate us by acting as a sales and customer support team on behalf of our customers instead of their own sales teams. We often compete with the carrier direct sales teams to deliver the same product at the same or better price. Our customers choose us because we’re in a vendor-agnostic position to present multiple options to our customers. We never force a single solution or are incentivized to provide the wrong product to our customers. The flexibility in our business model allows us to follow a consultative approach to deliver the service that best fits our customers’ needs.

Internet Service Providers can be a hassle to wrangle. Between identifying available copper and fiber in or near your building, sorting out the proper speeds and feeds for you, the construction and installation process, the post-sales support, and the escalations in the event of a service outage—we’re there for our customers. We support hundreds of locations worldwide and simplify our customers’ lives by being a standardized point of contact. Our customers can still work directly with the carrier’s technical and billing teams, but many choose to contact us instead. We do our best to make your life easier.

For complex, international, and high-availability projects, we aggressively research on behalf of our customers and provide detailed reports based on their unique needs. Many customers require near-100% uptimes due to contractual obligations or Just-In-Time manufacturing bids. We’ll help design the carrier infrastructure to meet their needs by researching the routes traffic takes along the Local Exchange Carrier, to the local Point of Presence, and up to the backbone. In some cases, we’ll even work with the carrier to force traffic over particular routes to protect against environmental catastrophes affecting entire regions. We’ll then piece together completely redundant networks so our customer’s traffic doesn’t cross paths. This process protects our customers from localized fiber cuts, regional outages, and the occasional major backbone outage.

Internet Service Providers (i.e., carriers) typically provide several wireline services to their customers. From the broadband internet used in homes, coffee shops, and small offices to dedicated or burstable fiber connections delivered to HQs and data centers, ISPs provide transit services. That transit is for the internet or private network solutions, like point-to-points or Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). Many will also deliver voice to on-premise phone systems and power the dialing plans behind cloud-based phone systems.

ISP Categories

Tier 1: The carrier owns its backbone or the long-haul infrastructure crossing the country. It may also own local infrastructure that is delivered to your office.

Tier 2: The carrier does not own its backbone but leases it from Tier 1 ISPs. Tier 2’s are your well-known cable providers like Spectrum, Comcast, and Cox.

Tier 3: The carrier owns a small or localized network. Commonly referred to as a mom-and-pop telco, these internet service providers may cover a few city blocks or rural communities. They’ll deploy and manage the local infrastructure but then rely on a wholesale contract from Tier 1 or 2 to reach the internet.

When building out customer networks, we pay close attention to recommended providers. It doesn’t do our customers much good if they want a high-availability network but end up with a single point of failure! A regional outage can take both connections down if their preferred primary carrier is Tier 1, but Tier 1 is leasing space on their backbone to the chosen Tier 2. This happens more often than you’d think, as only a handful of Tier 1 providers in the US exist. We work to demystify all this information and provide straightforward proposals to our customers.

We will meet with our customers to understand their needs best to get engaged. Some folks are okay with it if their office is closed for a day or two due to a fiber cut, while other organizations could face life-and-death consequences. We want to understand your needs, budget, technical requirements, and where you see yourself 3 or 5 years out. Ultimately, we’ll present all the options we find in our research but will take the time to review and call out the pros and cons. We must consider your business’s needs, as many business applications are moving to the cloud. We want to help find the best solution for you and your organization.

CornerStone is unique because we pay attention to more than just your bandwidth needs. We understand how traffic is handled on your routing and security appliance and how that device passes traffic to your network core. We’ll identify potential bottlenecks or pitfalls—for example, some may want a 1Gb connection to handle Hyper-V replication between their sites but could be hampered by a security appliance that only allows for 300Mb of throughput. We don’t want to sell you a product you can’t use, but we can help appropriately scope a newer or upgraded appliance to handle your business’s needs.

For a simple request delivering an internet connection to a handful of sites, we may only need a quick 30-minute conversation to understand your company and needs better. For a more complicated request of high-availability deployments to locations between a handful of countries, we would plan a scoping call and working sessions to determine the best solution for you. We will consult for highly complicated requests covering many sites and work with your networking team to architect the best design for your business.

We’ll also monitor voice handling. Old PRIs, calling plans, and SIP services can be challenging to manage, so we specialize in creating a migration plan for our customers. Whether our customers are maintaining their on-prem system or migrating to the cloud, we’ll work with them to best plan around the porting process.

ISP / Carrier List:

ACC Business, AT&T, Breezeline, BullsEye Telecom, CallTower, China Mobile International Limited, China Telecom, Claro, CMC Networks, Colt, Comcast Business and Masergy, Commandlink, Consolidated Communications, Cox Business, Crown Castle, C Spire, Dobson Fiber, Everstream, FiberLight, FirstLight, Frontier, Fusion Connect, Granite Telecom, GTT, Infobip, Lightpath, lingo, LOGIX Fiber Networks, LS Networks, Lumen, Mediacom, MetTel, Momentum Telecom, New Horizon, Nitel, Optimum Business, Pilot, PS Lightwave, Shaw Business, Skywire Networks, Spectrotel, Spectrum, Telefonica, Telstra, T-Mobile, Towerstream, Unite Private Networks, Uniti Fiber, US Signal, Verizon, Windstream, WOW Business, Zayo, ZeroOutages, Ziply Fiber